The Moving to Opportunity program grew in part out of the research of
Professor James Rosenbaum of NorthwesternUniversity on the Chicago
Gautreaux Program. The Gautreaux program was established in the late 1970s as
part of a court-imposed public housing desegregation remedy. Black families who
were residents of public housing or eligible to move into public housing
received Section 8 certificates that had to be used to move to predominantly
white or racially mixed neighborhoods. Participants also received screening,
counseling, and home referral services.

Rosenbaum found that adults in the Gautreaux program who moved to suburban
communities experienced notable improvements in employment experience, and that
the prospects for children who moved improved dramatically. However, the way in
which the Gautreaux program was designed limits the application of
Rosenbaumï¿½s findings. For example, interest in the Gautreaux program among
eligible families is difficult to disentangle from more general interest in
Section 8 assistance, because Gautreaux offered families a short-cut around the
Chicago Public Housing Authority's years-long Section 8 waiting list. In
addition, Rosenbaum's research was largely limited to families who stayed in
their new housing units, making it impossible to determine the number or
characteristics of families who chose not to remain in the predominantly white
neighborhoods to which they moved.

Finally, the comparison reference group for research on Gautreaux
participants (families who used their Section 8 certificates within the city of
Chicago) does
not represent a true control group; families who moved to the suburbs may have
differed systematically in motivation and capacity from those who remained in
the city. Thus, the major short-coming of earlier studies of mobility programs
is that they estimated program effects by comparing participant outcomes to
outcomes for a self-selected comparison group. These estimates cannot
definitively separate effects of the mobility program with pre-existing
differences between those who joined the program and those who did not. Only by
randomly assigning families from a common pool of applicants to different types
of housing assistance is it possible to be confident that systematic
differences are attributable to mobility counseling and housing assistance.

MTO LEGISLATIVE HISTORY

The Moving to Opportunity demonstration was
authorized by Section 152 of the 1992 Housing and Community Development Act.
The Act provided funding for tenant-based rental assistance and supportive
counseling services to test and evaluate the effectiveness of metropolitan
area-wide efforts to increase housing mobility. Efforts seek to “assist
very low-income families with children who reside in public housing or housing
receiving project-based assistance under Section 8 of the Housing and Community
Development Act of 1937 to move out of areas with high concentrations of
persons in poverty to areas with low concentrations of such persons.”

When MTO was authorized, Congress appropriated approximately $70 million for
approximately 1,300 Section 8 rental assistance payments for the demonstration
and a modest amount of funding for housing counseling. Although Congress
rescinded a second year of funding for MTO in 1995, Section 8 rental assistance
resources and counseling resources increased because the Los
Angeles and Boston
housing authorities volunteered to add additional Section 8 certificates and
vouchers from their own Section 8 programs to the demonstration.

Five sites were selected by HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros in March of 1994 --
Baltimore, Boston,
Chicago, Los Angeles,
and New York.
The MTO was implemented between 1994 and 1999 by local Public Housing
Authorities (PHAs) and Non-Profit Organizations (NPOs)

MTO PROGRAM DESIGN

The MTO Program was implemented in five large cities with populations of at
least 400,000 in metropolitan areas of at least 1.5 million people. Participant
eligibility was limited to very low-income families with children who lived in
public housing or Section 8 project-based housing located in central city
neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty.

Eligible participants in the MTO demonstration were randomly assigned to
three groups:

the Experimental group
receives Section 8 rental certificates or vouchers usable only in
low-poverty areas (census tracts with less than 10 percent of the population
below the poverty line in 1989); along with this, they receive counseling
and assistance in finding a private unit to lease;

the Section 8 comparison
group receives regular Section 8 rental certificates or vouchers
(geographically unrestricted) and the typical briefings and assistance
from the PHA; and

the Control group continues
to receive their current project-based assistance.

HUD has implemented a carefully controlled experimental
design for MTO to definitively answer questions about the effectiveness of
mobility counseling and about the long-term impacts of moving to low-poverty
communities. Specifically, the demonstration is designed to answer two
important sets of questions about the role and effectiveness of assisted housing
mobility. First, what are the impacts of mobility counseling on families'
location choices and on their housing and neighborhood conditions? And
ultimately, what are the impacts of neighborhood conditions on the employment,
income, education, and social well-being of MTO families?

The participants in the MTO program volunteered to participate. Thus the
results of the MTO study cannot be generalized to the larger population; the
qualities that led them to volunteer may also affect their outcomes. However, because
of the random assignment of the volunteers into one of the three groups
mentioned above, the characteristics of the members of each group will, on
average, be the same. Hence, the MTO program makes it possible to isolate the
effects on various outcomes of MTO versus standard Section 8 vouchers and
public housing.

Outcomes for all three groups will be systematically monitored and evaluated
over a ten-year period, in order to fully assess the impacts of housing
mobility assistance. This random-assignment experimental design is essential to
achieve the statutory goals of MTO.